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Friday, December 5, 2008

It's amazing how little things can add a big difference to video when you're trying to make it look like film. Anything from color correction to proper shadows to lens flares can help.

Lately I've been playing around with ways to create lens flares in After Effects without using plug-ins or generators. I've used everything from solids to the glow plugin to motion tracking, etc. Here are two examples: one was created with a very popular plugin, and the other was created in after effects without any plugins; see if you can guess which is which:

Notice how only the top one has a core, the bottom one does not...the top is the one that I created in After Effects, the other was made using another popular plug-in. For three minutes of work it looks very good. What you can't tell by the pictures though, is that the top one has much more smooth movement than does the bottom when it's applied to video.

There may be a how-to post or maybe even a tutorial that deals with this sort of thing in the near future. Let me know what you guys think!

About Grant

Grant Swanson is a film-maker, editor, director, visual effects artist and colorist with a high level of expertise. He has been making films since he was about ten years old, starting with his neighbor's hand-cranked camera. A few years later he began to integrate visual effects, eventually becoming acquainted with Adobe After Effects (which he has been using for about seven years now). He learned the art and science of digital cinema by spending hundreds of hours reading books, watching countless tutorials on the internet, participating in online forums, viewing dozens of hours of training DVDs, and, most importantly, by spending thousands of hours practicing and making his own films.

Mr. Swanson lives in Eagan, Minnesota. He works on various projects, including his own short (and not-so-short) films. Grant can be reached by e-mail at grant@videoapex.net.

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